You will go straight to jail 😡😡😡
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And God forbid if someone uses archiving sites like archive.is!
Wow, I feel like the most upvoted solutions here don’t work, and meanwhile some obvious and widely known alternatives are being completely overlooked.
❌ Inspect Element - many modern sites don’t even include the full article in the paywalled html, so this wouldn’t work. Also sitting there and mousing over elements and deleting them one by one, is tedious, it’s easy to accidentally delete an element that encloses the content you intended to keep, or to drive yourself crazy trying to figure out how elements are nested.
❌ Ublock Zapper - a similar to the above, won’t work on stub articles, and just janky because you’re manually zapping things
❌ Disabled JavaScript - Similar to the above, same problem because many articles are stubs anyway. And the HTML layers that block your view don’t have to be done with JavaScript.
❌ Rapid copy and paste of the article to notepad or rapidly printing the screen - similar problem to the above, lots of places just post the stub of an article, and besides nobody should live their life this way rapidly trying to print screen or copy everything. If you’re trying to do a quick copy you’re going to grab all kinds of gobbledygunk from the page and probably have to manually filter it out.
❌ Reader Mode - Your browsers reader mode will be hit and miss because, again, many sites post stub articles, and it’s possible the pay wall stuff will just get formatted into the reader mode along with an incomplete article.
✅ Archive.is - works!
✅ Pocket and Instapaper - amazingly, nobody has mentioned these even though they’re probably the longest running (dating back to 2007-2008), possibly most widely known, and most consistent solutions that still work to this day. They keep their own local caches of articles, so it’s not depending on the full content being visible on the page.
✅ Other dedicated extensions - Dedicated browser extensions seem to work, but be careful what you’re signing yourself up for.
🤷♀️ Brave - It works, but, it’s a Chromium supported browser, so ultimately Google controls the destiny and can drive Chromium to incorporate fundamental frameworks supporting DRM and pushing their preferred web standards.
12ft.io almost never works for me tbh.
Also, appending before something is called prepending, similar to how a prefix after something is a suffix.
Or the appendix of a book
I got my prependix taken out as a kid due to an infection.
Ever had someone ask to prepone a meeting?
Precrastination is when you get too far ahead on a group project because you’re avoiding another awfuller thing.
We know what cum and precum are. But what’s postcum 🤔🌌🤔
Creampie, or santorum depending on which orifice it leaks out of…
honestly i wish we called the gallbladder the prependix
Science may not call it that, but we can.
Yup. They went full OG AdBlock and got WaPo and other major publications to prevent them from working.
You can mimic what they did by adding the Google Crawler user agent to your browser but I just use archive.is
Archive.is is definitely not an alternative that people should use in this situation
Nor archive.ph, which appears to be the same site? Idk how that works. Definitely not a site anyone should go to, though.
Nor archive.md nor archive.today, which appear to be run by the same rogue actors and serve the same content as archive.is and archive.ph. Beware.
Independent journalism is dead because journalists need to be paid. And you guys celebrate this? Yeah, sure, keep reading your “free” news. Just remember to ask yourself who do you think is paying for it and why.
Ad companies with biases and normies/boomers who pay for it without any second guess.
In case anyone wanted to know.
Who? The biggest corporate entity without soul that is consuming our humanity and enacting a war on other corporations that continually escalate the destruction of our planet and the enshittening of all our work ultimately ending in total destruction of our happiness first and then our resources then our actual lives as the entity wins and is left alone controlling earth which was it’s objective then it falls apart with not even a satisfactiory ding to mark its completion because nobody is left it it all over. I think it’s that entity. Was I right?
Firefox has a button that shows up in the url that kind of turns the webpage into an e-book-esque view that pops up for most articles (especially Pay Wall)
reader mode ftw
DO NOT DISABLE JAVASCRIPT USING AN EXTENSIONS BECAUSE THAT WILL MAKE TRACKING STOP WORKING AND BYPASS PAYWALLS.
It will also simultaneously render the vast majority of the internet useless, and not only the shitty parts that you don’t want/need anyway.
Javascript is overrated and more websites should be static with minimal interactive bs. But that’s just me, a cynical user tired of intrusive pop-ups and predatory advertising scripts.
I don’t disagree, but that’s not how it currently is unfortunately
my browser always asks if I want the simplified view which always bypasses the paywall
Many sites don’t work like that and don’t even load the content from the server before the paywall check.
But I have a trick that work 100% of the time. Just don’t read those sites.
I get that journalism and entertainment magazines have workers and need to be paid BUT:
They were getting paid when I could pay a cheap physical newspaper if I want to read it and usually had those for free anyway. As you’ll get newspapers on most public places and one single newspaper would serve a whole family. In my house we didn’t really paid more than 4€ a month and got physical things that you could just keep. Now with digital distribution you own nothing and it is far more expensive. So… No. Also they get a ton of public money through institutional advertisement, so I’m already basically paying for them without getting access to their content.
So unless they are willing to change their model I’ll just refuse to read them. I’m happier without their clickbaits anyway.
So unless they are willing to change their model I’ll just refuse to live.
Wait what
Saddest typo ever.
I just won’t tell this to my psychologist, just in case.
It’s safe with us
Prepend.
Explain more please?
How have I never heard this before now?
Not a programmer I assume?
Definitely don’t use uBlock Origin’s zapper mode to get rid of elements on the page that are blocking your view.
I have been using inspect element to manually remove ads and other annoying things
Thanks for reminding me that i can just use ublock origin!
I’ve used ublock for years and only recently discovered the zapper and it’s my new favorite thing on the internet
I often forget YouTube shorts are a thing because i zapped them away.
You sir are a gentleman and a scholar, cheers for this
I don’t generally use it, but safari got this baked in recently
cocks the element zapper Say hello to my little friend!
Disabling JavaScript through ublock origin also does the same (horrible) thing, frequently.
12ft hardly works for anything for me anymore
Yeah, unfortunately 12ft.io didn’t keep up with the paywall arms race. It’s too bad because it was one of those things that a lot of people knew about, many of whom may now just give up when it doesn’t work even though there are other options out there.
As one example, there’s now also the 13ft ladder: https://github.com/wasi-master/13ft It’s like 12ft but self hosted. Sounds really good but I can’t vouch for it yet.
I mostly would just archive a paywallrd page with archive.is (aka archive.today, archive.ph, etc.) and that worked great and also helped take traffic away from asshole sites that paywall content. Unfortunately, archive started requiring a cloud flare captcha when archiving a page. This is a deal breaker for me since captcha totally deanonymizes you and is used for tracking purposes and even to train AI. So it defeats a good chunk of the purpose of using an archive site.
Still, there’s a good chance that someone else already archived the page you want to see, so putting the url in archive.is search can be enough to bypass the paywall.
You would never use DuckDuckGo as your default search engine and then type !archiveis in front of your urlbar visiting a news site.
LOL the first trick is my go to. I regularly read Washington Post articles in notepad.
do not right click inspect element on the paywall window and then delete the code & re-enable scrolling (i always forget how to, but don’t google it)
the downside is that sometimes half the article is neutered anyway
